As a short-story writer, Alice Munro has achieved high critical and popular regard in both her native Canada and in the United States. Indeed, Munro has been adopted by the entire English-speaking world as one of its own, and her work has received many awards and honors. In the U.S., she is roundly regarded as one of the best—if not the best—contemporary writers of the short story, and one of the greatest living fiction writers. Here, Brad Hooper takes readers through her fiction, work by work, discussing the themes, forms, techniques, and styles she employs to make her work come alive. Munro has founded her own brand of the short story: longer than traditionally practiced in the short-story form and encompassing broader time frames. Her stories are primarily character studies that explore the impact of physical and mental isolation in adolescence, middle age, and into elder years. Hooper traces Munro's evolving definition of the short story form and surveys the fiction in an effort to elucidate the works for newcomers and enthusiasts alike.

Ethics and Affects in the Fiction of Alice Munro explores the representation of embodied ethics and affects in Alice Munro’s writing. The collection illustrates how Munro’s short stories powerfully intersect with important theoretical trends in literary studies, including affect studies, ethical criticism, age studies, disability studies, animal studies, and posthumanism. These essays offer us an Alice Munro who is not the kindly Canadian icon reinforcing small-town verities who was celebrated and perpetuated in acts of national pedagogy with her Nobel Prize win; they ponder, instead, an edgier, messier Munro whose fictions of affective and ethical perplexities disturb rather than comfort. In Munro’s fiction, unruly embodiments and affects interfere with normative identity and humanist conventions of the human based on reason and rationality, destabilizing prevailing gender and sexual politics, ethical responsibilities, and affective economies. As these essays make clear, Munro’s fiction reminds us of the consequences of everyday affects and the extraordinary ordinariness of the ethical encounters we engage again and again.

Alice Munro is Canada’s greatest short story writer. This book, the first full length study of her work published in Britain, explores the appeal of Munro’s fictions of small-town Canadian life with their precise attention to social surfaces and their fascination with local gossip and scandal. This is a world of open secrets, and Howells highlights Munro’s distinctive storytelling methods which combine the familiar and the unfamiliar, slipping between realism and fantasy to make visible what is usually hidden within everyday life. These are women’s narratives, full of silent female knowledge--of female bodies, love stories and romantic fantasies as well as female casualties. Munro takes up the traditional subjects of women’s fiction through her stories’ significantly female plots, stories of entrapment and escape attempts, where secrecy and silence become strategies of resistance. Munro’s enthusiasm for the work of other women writers from Emily Brontë and L. M. Montgomery to Eudora Welty is emphasized as Munro continues to experiment with the short story form, creating worlds which are both "touchable and mysterious."

The book studies Alice Munro’s inheritance of and contribution to realism in fiction. Nobel Prize winner Munro follows the empirical tradition of the Enlightenment and draws on her life as a daughter, wife, mother, and professional writer while composing her fiction to reflect Canadian reality. She infuses her intellectual, moral, and aesthetic vision into her stories. This study analyzes her innovative realism in three respects: Her views on feminism and women’s issues, her firm yet sympathetic moral stance, and her reconstitution of traditional and modernist (post-modernist) methods of portraying character in time and space. Munro’s brand of realism is underpinned by her philosophical perception, her level-headed morality, her dialectical mind, and her versatile narrative style. This monograph, a voice from China, offers a deep philosophical reading of Munro. Students of the Canadian author, graduate or undergraduate, may find this book useful.

Through the years, this Canadian writer has emerged as a master of the short story. The compressed and encapsulated energies of the form allow Alice Munro to peel away at the smooth and mundane surfaces that contain her characters' lives to reveal harsher truths within. This acclaimed writer is profiled for the first time in this indispensable series through full-length critical essays that plumb the depths of her rich, fictive worlds. In this new work, a chronology of her life, a bibliography of Munro's work, and an index provide valuable information for student researchers.

Taking its cue from medieval bestiaries, this alphabet book is composed of 63 entries ranging from ADDER to WOLFHOUNDS, with each entry juxtaposing an image, an excerpt from a story by Alice Munro, and a commentary. The images are reproduced from original medieval illuminations, the excerpts feature an animal, or a human being depicted through animal comparison, and the commentaries highlight the way Munro suggests relationality between the human and the non-human. Munro troubles the boundaries between good and evil as she troubles the boundaries between human and non-human. Through the mask of the animal, she effects a release from strict morality and proposes an uncommon and undomesticated representation of human life, revolving on simultaneous transcendence and derision. The volume will appeal to Munro scholars and to lovers of Alice Munro alike because it solves some of the enigmas set by her stories but suggests other riddles and more secrets.

The book offers a new approach to the study of Alice Munro's fiction. Its innovative quality consists in juxtaposing a variety of literary analyses of selected stories with two other ways of looking at her fiction: the perspectives of film adaptation and of pedagogy. The book is divided into three parts which mirror the key words in the title: understanding, adapting and teaching. Part One consists of four articles on various aspects of Munro's short fiction from a literary perspective. Part Two - four essays - addresses editing and film adaptations of Munro's stories (both television and feature films). Part Three consists of an essay on didactic aspects of Munro's fiction and of several interviews with teachers of Canadian literature who have included stories by Munro in their syllabi.

Among the first critical works on Alice Munro's writing, this study of her short fiction is informed by the disciplines of narratology and literary linguistics. Through examining Munro's narrative art, Isla Duncan demonstrates a rich understanding of the complex, densely layered, often unsettling stories.

Alice Munro’s Miraculous Art is a collection of sixteen original essays on Nobel laureate Alice Munro’s writings. The volume covers the entirety of Munro’s career, from the first stories she published in the early 1950s as an undergraduate at the University of Western Ontario to her final books. It offers an enlightening range of approaches and interpretive strategies, and provides many new perspectives, reconsidered positions and analyses that will enhance the reading, teaching, and appreciation of Munro’s remarkable—indeed miraculous—work. Following the editors’ introduction—which surveys Munro’s recurrent themes, explains the design of the book, and summarizes each contribution—Munro biographer Robert Thacker contributes a substantial bio-critical introduction to her career. The book is then divided into three sections, focusing on Munro’s characteristic forms, themes, and most notable literary effects.

Alice Munro has devoted her entire career to the short story form in her fourteen collections, having won the Nobel Prize in Literature “as master of the contemporary short story”. This edited volume investigates her art as a storyteller, the processes she performs on the contemporary short story genre in her creative anatomical theatre. Divided into five topical sections, it is a collection of scholarly chapters which offer textual insights into a single story, compare two or more texts, or casts a more panoramic view on Munro’s literary production, embracing stories from her first collection Dance of the Happy Shades to her last published Dear Life. Through different critical approaches that range from post-structuralism to cultural studies, from linguistics and rhetorical analyses to translation studies, the authors insist on the concept that no fixed patterns prevail in her short stories, as Munro has constantly developed, challenged, and revised existing modes of generic configuration, while discussing the fluidity, the elusiveness, the indeterminacy, the ambiguity of her superb writing.